When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States last spring, advocates immediately warned that catastrophic outbreaks would soon pummel prisons and jails due to poor medical services, unhygienic conditions, and the tightly interwoven routines of incarcerated people and prison staff. An outspoken cohort of lawyers, organizers, journalists, and incarcerated people themselves demanded bold action to mitigate the crisis by reducing prison populations, including through executive measures like commutation and clemency.

In some cases, judges and policymakers heeded the warning, significantly cutting jail populations in a number of counties using a variety of executive and judicial mechanisms. While it denied 98 percent of all compassionate release requests, the Federal Bureau of Prisons still moved almost eight thousand prisoners (or about 5 percent of the federal prison population) to home confinement.

At the state level, however, mass releases to control the spread of coronavirus were never seriously entertained. And the severe consequences were soon apparent: nineteen of the country’s twenty largest COVID-19 clusters at the end of the summer were in correctional facilities. By the end of 2020, researchers estimated that one in five incarcerated people in the United States had been infected. COVID-19 infection rates in state and federal prisons are now four times higher than in the general population, and at least 1,671 incarcerated people have died of the virus.